Company Thinks `Arthur' Has Stuff To Scale Heights

Incubation Over, `Arthur' Arrives

After seven years, "Arthur: The Musical" has reached the final stage of its development.

The makers of the musical, based on the 1981 film comedy starring Dudley Moore as the always inebriated multimillionaire, have gone through years of nurturing: getting the rights to the material, gathering the creative team and working to raise money to keep the project alive. They received a major boost last fall when they landed a workshop production at Goodspeed-at-Chester/the Norma Terris Theatre.

Michael Price, executive director of the Goodspeed Opera House, liked what he saw and exercised his contractual right-of-first-refusal for Chester shows and grabbed "Arthur" for the following main-stage season.

The show will receive its most complete production yet when it opens tonight at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam. (The run will continue through Sept. 27.)

The show now stars Gregg Edelman, who was involved at earlier stages of the show's development but was not in the Chester production because of his Tony Award-nominated role in the Broadway musical "City of Angels." (Christopher Wells, who was in the Hartford Stage Company's production of "The Snow Ball," starred in the Chester production.)

"The Chester experience was a whirlwind," says director Joseph Billone, during a lunch break last week. There were "three weeks of rehearsals, then three weeks of playing with a lot of scrutiny with people coming all the time from New York. It was a pressure cooker because there were a lot of people coming to the show saying, `I don't care if you're calling it a workshop, I'm here to judge the show.' "

Still, the creators were finally putting the show on its feet and getting the opportunity to present it to a live audience.

Before the show was staged in Chester, the main things people were saying about its concept were: 1) You can't do a musical about a drunk.

Edelman says the drinking issue was never a problem for his interpretation of the role.

"I never looked at [Arthur] as a drunk but rather a guy in his 30s -- and we all know these people, who are just so restless, that the only thing they have in their lives are the evenings when they can go out to party. Then they have one too many drinks, and get a little too loud, trying to make enough noise so that they don't notice that they're not happy. I always tapped into that. The drinking was just one manifestation of that."

The tall, blond, good-looking American actor is visually opposite from the short, dark, middle-aged and British Moore, enabling audiences to see Arthur in an entirely new way, says Billone.

The Chicago-born Edelman says he is frequently cast as a boyish, silly-but-intelligent, nice guy. Hal Prince, who directed him in the revival of "Cabaret," called him "a musical Henry Fonda."

Edelman, who last played at Goodspeed's second stage in 1985's "Georgia Avenue," says his leading roles in such Broadway shows as "City of Angels" and the revivals of "Cabaret" and "Anything Goes" have helped his career. But having high profile roles doesn't guarantee the opportunity to star in the next big show.

"I'm sort of a name," says the affable Edelman. "People kind of know me. But when you're trying to sell a Broadway show these days, [a producer] would really love to have a big fat TV name who also happens to sing and act and dance."

Edelman says that the type of shows that Broadway seems to be doing now works in favor of "Arthur."

As Billone explains it, the show is more of a traditional musical, where good times and the focus on relationships are more important than epic themes and towering sets.

" `Arthur' is not so much a director's piece as it is a writers' and actors' piece," says Billone. "Now the director's hand is incredibly strong but in a way that is hopefully not apparent to the audience. This should not look like, `Oh, they were in trouble, so the director decided if everybody put on blue costumes and turned upstage at the same time, we could make this stupid moment work.' "

In terms of costumes and scenery, the look for "Arthur" is stylish, not staggering.

"We always wanted to keep the show light scenically," says Billone. "We wanted the emotion to carry the most weight and not the sets or the costumes."

Billone also notes that with no epic British musicals on the horizon, the time might be right for a musical like "Arthur."

Edelman credits the popularity of shows such as "City of Angels" with having "people somehow miraculously rediscovering the importance of a book [script]. The funny stuff, the good script, it means so much and people always seem to forget it."

The nature of the times is also a factor, says Billone. "During a recession, comedies are a mainstay. People want to feel good, and when you look at what's coming to Broadway it's really a lot more of the feel-good, conventional thing."